Eric and Brian talk to colleague Paulo Matos about how Igalia — a flat, worker owned business — deals with Corporate Social Responsibility, what we do, and why we believe it is interesting.
Brian Kardell: Hi, I'm Brian Kardell. I'm a developer advocate at Igalia.
Eric Meyer: And I am Eric Meyer, also a developer advocate at Igalia. And our guest today is Paulo. Paulo, could you introduce yourself?
Paulo Matos: Yes, of course. Hello, my name is Paulo, and I'm a compiler engineer at Igalia.
Eric Meyer: Awesome. And we actually invited Palo on today's show because-
Brian Kardell: Nothing to do with compilers, incidentally.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, in fact, nothing to do with compilers. This is not a compilers show. We may have one of those in the future, but what we're going to talk about today is actually Igalia's corporate social responsibility team, which Paulo is a part of. Paulo, could you just describe what CSR for corporate social responsibility is and what Igalia does?
Paulo Matos: Yes. So I'll try to do my best here. So CSR, I think it's well known in general in the business environment. We at Igalia, I think, have tried to align with that external view of CSR, but also try to do our own thing. As a business, we believe it's essential to operate in an economically, socially and environmentally-sustainable manner. And the idea for CSR is to give back to society in a good way and to say thanks to the communities and the societies we came from. So not only we donate and support projects that are part of larger organizations, but also much smaller organizations that are local to each Igalia's community.
Eric Meyer: Oh, okay. Yeah. You said this is managed in Igalia by a commission. I think just not to go too deep in the weeds, just as a little a side note, Igalia being a worker-owned cooperative, basically commissions are like task forces in a way within Igalia where a group of people who are interested in working on a particular thing can form a commission. So we have a CSR Commission and that's people within Igalia who have volunteered to work on this particular topic. And it's not the only commission, but that's just an example. But yeah.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, I just wanted to add that I think that, as Paulo said, this is a common thing that corporations have corporate social responsibility, and good for them. I don't really want to have any of them on the show. There's a lot of just greenwashing, and it's hard to figure out the corporate politics and everything. I think what makes this an interesting show and what makes CSR interesting at Igalia is that we are a worker-owned cooperative. Igalia is us. This is just people who are genuinely concerned enough to say, 'Hey, what can we do?' And makes it just interesting to talk about, not because we want credit for it, not because we want to brag, but because we think these things are important, and we think that it's interesting the way that Igalia does it. And I think we would be interested in how do we do more like this societally?
Eric Meyer: Right. So Paulo, how does it work? How does Igalia choose who to give to? How much do we give? That sort of thing.
Paulo Matos: Yes, that's an excellent question. I think following what Brian just said of this Igalia is us and the CSR Commission is very close, I think, to the heart of Igalians. One of the reasons I joined the Commission was because I just felt that it was a way for me to contribute and be able to support my local community and CSR in general within Igalia. And one of the ways we do that, we have several projects at the moment. But let me start, for example, with our support of NGOs, which was what we started with back in 2007. We have this yearly program where we donate 0.7% of our revenue to support different NGOs. And initially they started by supporting very large NGOs. So we're talking about UNICEF and Oxfam, doctors Without Borders, et cetera. But we have tried and we got to a point where most of the NGOs that we now support are very close to the communities that Igalia work with. And so we have a list of NGOs that we support that we yearly revise. And those NGOs can be, for example, if I may talk about my specific example, that's Fleck, for example, the German NGO from my village that supports immigrants' integration in Germany. But we also have an NGO that, for example, adopts and rescues dogs in communities in South Korea, and we have other small NGOs that support education, et cetera. But the important thing is that there's always a very strong connection from these smaller NGOs to specific Igalians that are really trying to get those NGOs some donations from our pot, let's say.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, so it's interesting. So 0.7% of the corporate revenue, so Igalia's revenue, why 0.7%? That seems like an oddly-specific number.
Paulo Matos: Yeah. So I was not involved in the decision back in 2007, but the idea comes from these actually quite all, if I'm not mistaken, from 1970 UN recommendation for countries to donate 0.7% from their gross national income to development countries.
Eric Meyer: Okay, so-
Paulo Matos: Yeah, we pick up that number and integrate it into our own project.
Eric Meyer: Right. So looking at established practice or recommendation and saying, 'All right, we'll do that too.' Yeah. And so you mentioned that one of the NGOs and NGO, non-governmental organization, one of them is from where you are and then you mentioned one in South Korea. We have a Igalians who are located in South Korea, and that's how we would've heard about the NGO's there. So let's say I identify an NGO in Cleveland where I live, or Brian identifies one in Pittsburgh where he lives, how would we go about trying to get some of Igalia's CSR contributions to our local NGOs?
Paulo Matos: Yeah, so that's a great question. So what happens is there is an NGO period... sorry, there's a period during the year where we accept NGO applications that is an Igalian that generally is connected to an NGO in the local community and says, 'Look, I would like this NGO to be part of our donation list, of our 0.7% program,' and you just have to gather some information. Sometimes that information is available on a website. In my case, because my NGO is so close to me, I actually go to the meetings and gather that information. But you fill out a form, you send the form and you present your NGO in our internal mailing lists to all Igalians so that Igalians get to know the budget and activities of the NGO. And then when it comes time to distribute the money, your NGO is going to be there. We recently added a request that you ask for other Igalians to also support your NGO so that there's not a lot of contributions to a single NGO. So the Igalians that say, 'Yes, I commit to supporting your NGO,' then actually do contribute some money from their own budget to that NGO.
Brian Kardell: Yeah. So the thing that's always been really, really interesting to me is that there are a lot of worthy causes. Do you know what I mean?
Paulo Matos: Yeah. Yeah.
Brian Kardell: I don't make enough money to give to all the things that I think are deserving of money, even if it's just a little bit of money to each one of them. I know we can maybe list some of the ones that we do. We listed a couple already, but we also have some other things like reforestation projects and things like that. How do we choose? And it's interesting to me, so we divvy up a little bit. Like you have so many dollars you can allocate and it's hard. It's hard. Even with all this process where we identify the ones that can, yeah, I don't know. I'm curious for both of your thoughts on this just as a fellow Igalian. When it comes to that time of the year, I honestly struggle. Do you know what I mean?
Paulo Matos: Yeah. So first I think I need to clarify something, which is, I started talking about our NGO program, the 0.7% program because it was the first one that kickstarted the CSR Commission back in 2007. But then Brian just mentioned reforestation. Now reforestation is outside that program and it has its own budget. So the CSR budget in total is more than 0.7% of Igalia's revenue. So for example, for reforestation projects, we have at the moment 0.3%. So we have 0.7% for NGOs. And then if we take a step back and look at the CSR work, we have mainly three things. We're having a couple of others. We had a couple of others in the past, but we have mainly three things on a regular basis. That's our NGO program, that's our social investments, which we haven't touched yet, and our reforestation projects that have been going for the last few years. One thing that we can mention is, for example, we also had a program during the COVID times where we supported NGOs outside this budget to donate vaccines to development countries. And so even though we have a few continuing activities, there are also some things that sometimes we contribute to because they're necessary. An example is, for example, contributing donating to supporting the people who lost their homes in Brazil due to the floods even a few months ago. So there are some ongoing things that we support and we always keep an eye on. And the things that we have on a regular basis, like the NGOs, the social investments and reforestation, it's something that we track, but it's not everything that we do. One thing that it's worth pointing out is that the NGOs is one part of what we do and how the CSR Commission was created. I think I mentioned that earlier. But we have other projects over the last few years that were suggested and we're been contributing to for a few years. One of them is the idea of social investments and the idea was created because what happens with NGOs is that we gathered that amount of money on a yearly basis per NGO on our list and then we transfer the money to the NGO and don't necessarily track the amount of impact it had, don't necessarily track where that money was used on. And we wanted to be able to have specific investments less/projects that we could invest in that we could track the impact it had on the communities, on the society, on things that we could sometimes maybe even photograph or visit. And so we've been every year also gathering an idea of projects from Igalia's CSR Commission. We have also had our suggestions, but Igalians have also suggested a few of them on a yearly basis, which we have contributed to. And examples are, for example, last year we supported the acquisition of specialist push chairs to participate for two runners with the disabilities to participate in the New York Marathon. Or for example, we have a project to build a library in Yof in Senegal. So these are things that we transfer. We have few per year, but it's a larger amount of money. We transfer this money and then we track the project from its inception until its conclusion. In the case of the library, we have received photographs of the library being built, the material for the library being acquired and so on and so forth. And we have a few of these, and I think every year we try to commit to two or three projects, and these are projects that are measurable. So these are very interesting as well because Igalians can say, 'Well, I need an investment of, I don't know, 30, 40, 50,000 euros for something in my community. This is an interesting project for X, Y, Z. Can we include that in our social investments for this year?' And then that is evaluated by the Commission and if accepted, it's something that we will track and make sure that things go according to plan, and we'll let the whole of Igalia know how things are going.
Eric Meyer: Okay. Yeah. So when I was saying NGOs, that was a little bit lazy in a sense, though, since it's not just NGOs, but that's good to know. How do you feel about this, Paulo? You're on the Commission, so I guess you're in support, but why? What caused you to join the Commission?
Paulo Matos: Yeah, I referred to it at the beginning, but for me, the CSR Commission is us, is all of the Igalians. This money that we are donating, that we are contributing, it's our money. Because the way we're structured, this money is literally money that we don't pay ourselves. But it allows us to instead of privately contributing a small amount, it allows us to harness the power of Igalia as a consultancy and the power of several Igalians all over the world to contribute to something that has an impact on my community. I live in a very small village. We're about 4,000 people. And the fact that the NGO that I support and I have added to, that it's in our CSR Commission NGO list, has had a terrific impact on my community. And that's something that couldn't have happened otherwise. I think just like my example, many cases around the world for other Igalians, it's also a way for them to have an impact on their communities where they're not privately supporting, but harnessing the whole power of Igalia of the CSR Commission to be able to improve their own communities around them and their society around them. I think that's very powerful, and I joined the Commission because I thought that could with this initiative.
Eric Meyer: Of course, every Igalian can also individually contribute to whatever charities they like.
Paulo Matos: Absolutely.
Eric Meyer: And I'm sure that in many cases, the NGOs that Igalians or the charities or whatever, the social programs that Igalians get into our CSR program and harness that collective support from Igalia are also contributing individually. But yeah, it does, the whole procedure when you describe it sounds very mechanical. And I guess in a sense it is, but it's a structured way of coming to collective agreement about what would we like to collectively give aid to? Let's formalize this so that we can actually concentrate on getting to results.
Paulo Matos: Absolutely.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, and it's the thing that when I joined, I was like, 'Oh, wow, how does that work, and why is it so formalized?' But I've really come to appreciate that process of, okay, collectively we're going to vote on, or at least collectively participate in a process that pick a list of programs, NGOs, charities, social programs, et cetera, to then determine how much of our collective funding will be apportioned to each group. I've really come to appreciate it.
Paulo Matos: Yeah, of course. Of course, there is a process. We need a process with the amount of people that we have at this point to organize all the contributions. But this does not deny the fact that at any point, if there is calamity, there is something that needs urgent help in your community, in the community of some Igalian that they cannot come and people cannot come and say, 'Hey, my community needs help? How we're going to be able to help this community.' And that is something that we do on a yearly basis-
Eric Meyer: Right.
Paulo Matos: ... outside these things that we've been discussing, the social investments and the NGO and even the reforestation projects that we haven't even touched.
Eric Meyer: Well, let's touch them.
Paulo Matos: Yeah, sure. The reforestation projects are actually very, very interesting projects that started a few years ago. And they are really something that we have been going now back to it on year after year where we have a dedicated budget, outside social investments, outside the 0.7% NGO contributions where we contribute to reforestation not just to improve things now, but to make sure things are better in the future. At the moment, all of our reforestation projects are located in or near Galicia because as you know, Igalia is based there. And it's those who suggested to start this project found it easier to run a reforestation project near us. We actually had the opportunity a few years ago, and even this year last time we met in A Coruña to go and visit one of the Igalia forests, so projects that we had where we did reforestation of a large area. And so we keep increasing the area that we're trying to do reforestation. And this means that by reforestation, I mean we are removing the invasive trees in these areas and planting native forest. These reduces the chances of fires. This increases the fauna and flora of the area to return or to improve. And one thing that we would like to do, and that's one of our plans for the future, is to actually be able to bring these reforestations closer to other Igalians. So let's say, Eric, that you have of the need to do reforestation somewhere nearby. That's something that we're interested in knowing about. And so we are trying to do reforestation work outside of Galicia, but at the moment, all of the forests that we are working on are in Galicia.
Brian Kardell: We recently did a show with Robin Berjon that was about rewilding. And the analogy here is there are invasive species in a lot of cases, they were planted for some kind of profit motive, cut down a whole bunch of trees and then planted them. That was very shortsighted. It really decreased the biodiversity. There's all kinds of problems with that, and so reforestation is actually really, really interesting. And that makes me think about also global warming and CO2, and I just wanted to bring up that this is another thing that Igalia does. We talk a lot about what is our carbon footprint and how do we keep it low? What kind of things can we do? And I think we talk about this in real and concrete ways where we're looking for actions that we can take and then discussing them as opposed to just, I don't know, donating some money for carbon offsets and then saying, 'Yay, us!' As a corporation, I believe that we have positive impact and that Igalians care. I think that's really interesting. And I would like to know if maybe you've thought about cooperating with recently, Val, we had a show with her as well on co-ops, and she gave a great talk. There was a big event. I wonder if we'd thought about cooperating with other co-ops or discussing with other co-ops what they do, do they do anything here? How do they do it? And maybe looking at whether there's something that Igalians can do larger than just Igalia itself.
Paulo Matos: Yeah, that's a great comment, and actually, that brings me to the next thing. There are many things that we talk about, but the next thing that I wanted to mention is that even internally, CSR tries to improve things. Like you mentioned, you are talking about carbon footprint. We have trying to promote the introduction as an alternative to normal menus, the introduction of vegan menus. We have promoted the use of ethical banks where we keep our money. We have invested in renewable energy co-ops in the past, and we also have, for example, an initiative that we call the Green New Deal, where we're trying to find a business line where we can contribute on a regular basis while at the same time fighting climate change, for example. So we have a few things, and now going back to what you just mentioned, which is the co-op relations, that's something that we're very interested on. And we have actually now a couple of Igalians trying to take that up, which is, with what we learned running a co-op and the impact that we can have, how can we learn from others and also pass on the knowledge that we've gathered over the past 20 years on how to run a co-op and how to make decisions within the co-op and even try to understand what other co-ops are doing in terms of CSR that we might learn from them? So there is indeed something going on. It's ramping up. So this year we have two people actually trying to get this off the ground and trying to contact other and so on. Yeah.
Eric Meyer: Yeah. What else should we talk about with all of this? What have we not touched on?
Brian Kardell: Can we talk about this fact that it is very tricky to talk about this kind of stuff and not feel like you're just saying-
Paulo Matos: Showing off?
Brian Kardell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Eric Meyer: Right.
Brian Kardell: No. No, it's a tricky thing, right? Because we believe these things are important. We believe that Igalia's approach to them is interesting and novel, and we like talking about the causes that we're concerned about because it also helps bring more attention to those causes. I guess it is a tricky thing because, no offense to whatever, whoever, but when I see their corporate social responsibility posts and things like that, I'm, whatever. I don't really believe that they care. And Igalia is really not just some board somewhere or some tiny little faction of the company, but Igalia itself is trying and cares and I-
Paulo Matos: I think I have a very close connection to this CSR Commission because I can see, I can feel the impact it has again, on the community I live in. So I can give you the example that the first year that the NGO that I supported doubled its budget because of the CSA Commission of the contribution of Igalia, and that's something that it wouldn't be possible otherwise. So there was more meetups. There were more bikes distributed for immigrant children to go to school. There were more books bought. There was more medicine bought for everyone, so there is a real feeling that this has an impact. So I think one of the differences about the CSR, let's say, program in Igalia is that it is run by all of us, and the people in the Commission are really just being the accountants and the secretaries for everyone else. Tomorrow, if you want to propose an NGO in your community that needs help, you can do that and you can see the change. Yes, it'll take you some time, but it's something that you can do. You have the power to do that. And I think in larger organizations, it might be difficult or even impossible for you to support the NGO down your road. And I think that's very powerful.
Eric Meyer: Yeah.
Brian Kardell: Part of the thing that's difficult to balance about this is I am really proud to work here. I love my coworkers. I think we're-
Eric Meyer: Don't have to be bashful about that.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, no, I guess you don't have to be bashful about that, but I'm-
Paulo Matos: Yeah, I totally agree with you. I really love the way we work and how we interact and what the CSR does and so on.
Brian Kardell: Yeah. So why don't you tell us more about this Green New Deal thing?
Paulo Matos: Okay. So we're all technical people with knowledge and diverse technologies. How can we use our technical knowledge to try to improve things, and by improve things, have an impact, for example, in climate change or many others. I'll give a couple of examples in a minute, but in a summit a few years ago, there was an activity where we gathered up Igalians and we asked for people to separate into groups and to explain or to come up with an idea of a project that we would like to see implemented under this Green New Deal with the heading that we could use our technical knowledge to achieve something for the well-being of the planet, and we had great ideas. We had people suggesting that we could try to invest in tracking oil spills. One was this idea of trying to improve the supporting technology of GPGPU, which is nowadays obviously used for LLM training, but also used for climate modeling, and so we had-
Eric Meyer: The climate modeling was the intent of the proposal it was-
Paulo Matos: Yes, yes. So this discussion was even before obviously LLMs took over the discussion about GPGPU. So the idea of the Green Deal, so this is not finished. This is an idea that we're still working on. We had an investment to try to understand exactly and try to pinpoint exactly where we could have an impact in GPGPU, how it connects with climate modeling. We earned that investment last year, and now we're trying to understand where can we take this next.
Eric Meyer: Right. So it's a Igalia's Green New Deal. In America, there's a thing called Green New Deal that gets circulated around. They're not the same thing.
Paulo Matos: I see. Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. That's something that we just called it Green New Deal internally and it stuck, but it's disconnected from American politics.
Eric Meyer: Yes.
Brian Kardell: So one of the things I like about Igalia here, again, is that in technology we have this, I don't know-
Eric Meyer: Hubris?
Brian Kardell: Yeah, hubris, exactly. We have this hubris that is rampant that, 'Hey, I'm just going to casually disrupt transportation and I think I can do that,' or, 'I'm going to disrupt the hotel industry or whatever. I think I can disrupt medicine.' We look at everything as if it's just like, 'Well, it's only a technological problem.' 'Finance, we're going to disrupt finance.' I'm not saying that there's not huge room for improvements in all of those things, and that technology can't, you absolutely can. It's we have this hubris that we can minimize things and like, 'Oh, fools, we could just solve climate change with this one cryptocurrency.'
Eric Meyer: Yeah, whatever.
Paulo Matos: Right.
Brian Kardell: What I like about these is that it's not that, right? It's some small things that are practical things. There are really things where there are opportunities where it is totally within the realm of possibility that Igalia can help with these things.
Eric Meyer: One of the things I've noticed in these proposals has been that rather than having the hubris to think, 'Oh, we'll do this thing and solve it,' it has the opposite of, 'How can we help the people who know what they're doing do it better?' That very much, I think, suffuses the ethos of the entire what we're doing with CSR and with the projects that we propose, it's not, 'How can we fix this?' It's, 'How can we help people who know what they're doing fix this?'
Paulo Matos: Yeah, absolutely. I think that we have conscience that we don't know most of what needs to be done, but we do have a lot of technical knowledge that we want to try to apply in this area. This is not work for a client, so it's our own investment to try to understand if we can help in any way, and so it's just one step further. It's not trying to obviously solve the whole problem, which we know it's inherently very complex.
Brian Kardell: I would like to just add to that. That doesn't mean that we would not like to do this work for a client. We would very much welcome if there are some research organizations or things with government funding that are interested in actually tackling these problems and need technical work, that would be awesome. And we would love to do that, I think.
Eric Meyer: Right. Right.
Paulo Matos: Yeah, absolutely. Achieving a goal and being paid for it at the same time, then great.
Eric Meyer: But if not, if we can contribute, that in itself is sufficient.
Paulo Matos: Yeah, absolutely.
Eric Meyer: Cool. So before we wrap up here, what's the forward view for CSR and related efforts in Igalia?
Paulo Matos: Yes. In terms of vision that we have for the future, we have still these regular investments in the 0.7 NGO program, the social investments reforestation projects. But as we said, we have these ongoing interests in this Green New Deal, which we will continue to invest on and try to understand where we can have an impact. And then there's also the co-op relations that we talked about earlier on in the podcast, which is about trying to learn more and also shared what we learned with other co-ops. And so we're in the process of contacting some of them and going to meetups and try to understand how we can have create this shared knowledge among co-ops that not only we can contribute to, but also learn from. Yep. I guess that's all from my side.
Eric Meyer: Great. Paulo, I don't think we could end at any better place, so we're just going to say thanks for joining us.
Paulo Matos: Thank you very much for having me. Thank you very much for taking the time to learn about the CSR Commission, and I'll see you around. Thank you.
Brian Kardell
Eric Meyer
Paulo Matos